02/21/2025
Just found this article about Patsy's the East Harlem pizza joint.
Not sure exactly what date Norm proposed to Peg but I do know it was at Patsy's and that they married May 31 1950....we'll be coming up on 75 years. But sadly mom died of cancer in 1990. They had 40 amazing years together.
They often would talk about the nicholodian and how it was playing put a nickel nickel in and here the Nickelodeon. All I want is loving you, and music music music!
Makes me think of all the great music in East Harlem Preservation - John Cox and his brothers Colon School of music, all the churches especially on East 100th Street (Revs Norm and Peg Eddy Way, East 100Th Street Block Party and at The Booker T. Washington Learning Center.
Celebrate what is good.
Christopher Bell Raymond Rivera Felix Leo Campos Hector Velez Guadalupe José Vadi Emily Cintron Class Elvina Allen ONeal
New York Today
February 21, 2025
Author Headshot
By James Barron
Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at why a pizzeria owner named Patsy Grimaldi was a bridge to the early days of pizza in New York. We’ll also get details on changes to strengthen state oversight of New York City that Gov. Kathy Hochul asked for after deciding not to remove Mayor Eric Adams for now.
A slice of pizza lifted up from the pie.
Heather Willensky for The New York Times
First there was Patsy’s, then Grimaldi’s and Juliana’s, and somewhere along the way there was Patsy Grimaldi’s. A celebrated pizzeria owner who died last week at 93 had definite ideas about how to make pizza.
The owner, Patsy Grimaldi, who died last week at 93, didn’t make pies to be anything like those at Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s or Famous Original Ray’s.
“He is a crucial bridge, maybe the main bridge from the early, early days of pizza in New York — brick ovens fueled by coal,” Pete Wells, who stepped down several months ago as The New York Times’s restaurant critic, told me. “That’s the kind of oven he learned to use when he was 12 or 13 at his uncle’s place in East Harlem.” His uncle was Pasquale Lancieri. His restaurant was called Patsy’s. A later owner of that Patsy’s took issue with the name Grimaldi had given his pizzeria, so the Patsy’s in Brooklyn became Grimaldi’s.
But back to Grimaldi at the Patsy’s in East Harlem.
“At first he’s busing tables,” Pete said. “Within a few months, they send him back to make the pizzas. He is learning how old-school New York pizza was made when the pizzerias were run by the generation that came over from Naples around the turn of the century. That style becomes the thing that he knows.” It was not what pizza eaters in the 1960s and 1970s knew, after gas ovens came along — and produced a different kind of pizza, with a golden crust.
When Grimaldi opened his Patsy’s in 1990, “he brought everybody’s attention back to how great that brick oven was, with high heat that cooks really quickly with minimal but pure ingredients,” Pete said. “He brought everybody’s attention back to how great that could be.”
That brought people to Brooklyn. “Within weeks, celebrities were going out there,” Pete said. “I can’t think of a pizzeria in New York that was that kind of a scene. It hit on every level. Critics and pizza freaks were going crazy over it. One of the things it did, besides saying this style of pizza is very traditional to New York, was to say a pizzeria could be a fun, cool place that everybody wants to get into.”
There were celebrities, real and presumed. Once, according to New York magazine, Warren Beatty called and persuaded Grimaldi’s wife, Carol, to save him a table. When Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, showed up, Patsy Grimaldi looked at her and said, “So, are you in the movies, too?” And, when the crime boss John Gotti was on trial, his lawyers took lunch to their client by picking up a pizza at Patsy’s, wrapping the slices in aluminum foil, slipping them into their briefcases and carrying them into the courthouse.
Pete said that Grimaldi would point at customers who had a passing resemblance to a celebrity and say something like, “Hey, look, Marisa Tomei is here tonight.” One Patsy’s regular became “Mel Gibson.” Pete said the man “maybe kinda resembled” the actor and director “if the light was bad and you had lost your glasses.”
Grimaldi and his wife sold the restaurant in the late 1990s, when he was in his 60s, thinking they would retire. They “unretired” in the 2010s when the new owner moved the restaurant next door, and they leased their old space all over again. They called the new restaurant Juliana’s, after Grimaldi’s mother, because they had sold the Grimaldi’s name in the deal in the 1990s.
Frank Ciolli, who had bought Grimaldi’s from the Grimaldis, said that they were attempting to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.” But this week Grimaldi’s was polite, saying on its page that Patsy Grimaldi was a “true icon in the pizza world” whose “commitment to quality set a standard that continues to inspire us every day.”
The pizza menu at Juliana’s is almost disarmingly simple, with three kinds of “classics” — margherita, marinara and white — plus calzone. There is a limit on toppings — only two to a pie. There are also five “pizza specials” with set ingredients like grilled chicken, Monterey Jack cheese and guacamole. No changes, no substitutions.
Matthew Grogan, a former investment banker who became a partner with the Grimaldis, said Patsy Grimaldi was against the five pizza specials when he and Carol Grimaldi suggested them. But Patsy Grimaldi soon came around, Grogan said.
“He loved them,” Grogan said. “Same with meatballs. He didn’t want to serve meatballs. I said no, they’re too good.”
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